This study examines how professional legitimacy is constructed and negotiated in teacher professional development (PD), focusing on the interactional work of an external PD facilitator and teachers’ differentiated responses across career stages. In many contemporary PD systems—across Europe, Asia, and other international contexts—external facilitators are increasingly relied upon to introduce reform-oriented pedagogies, support teacher learning, and bridge policy and practice. However, facilitator influence cannot be assumed. Its effectiveness depends critically on whether teachers recognise the facilitator as legitimate, credible, and worthy of professional engagement. Despite this, existing research has paid limited attention to the relational processes through which facilitator legitimacy is established and interpreted within PD settings, particularly among teachers with contrasting professional trajectories.

Guided by this concern, the study addresses two research questions. First, it asks how the PD facilitator established and enacted professional legitimacy in the process of leading teacher professional development. Second, it investigates how teachers with different professional backgrounds—specifically senior and younger teachers—responded to and interpreted the facilitator’s legitimacy. By examining both enactment and interpretation, the study moves beyond treating legitimacy as an individual attribute of the facilitator and instead conceptualises it as a dynamic, relational accomplishment shaped through ongoing interaction.

The analytical framework is grounded in the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust (IMOT) proposed by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995), which offers a well-established theoretical basis for understanding trust as a process linking perception, relational behaviour, and outcomes. IMOT conceptualises trust not as a static state but as a dynamic relationship influenced by both the trustor’s disposition and the perceived trustworthiness of the trustee. The model integrates six interrelated components—trustor propensity, perceived trustworthiness, trust, perceived risk, risk-taking in the relationship, and outcomes—thereby capturing how individuals move from perception to action under conditions of uncertainty.

Central to this framework is the construct of perceived trustworthiness, which comprises three core dimensions: ability, benevolence, and integrity. Ability refers to perceptions of professional competence and expertise; benevolence refers to perceived goodwill and concern for others’ interests; and integrity refers to value alignment, fairness, and consistency with shared norms. In this study, these three dimensions are used to analyse how the facilitator’s actions, discourse, and positioning were interpreted by teachers and how such interpretations shaped their willingness to engage in professional risk-taking, such as experimenting with new pedagogies or exposing instructional uncertainty.

Professional legitimacy is thus conceptualised as an outcome of teachers’ trust judgements across these dimensions. Importantly, IMOT allows for systematic examination of variation in these judgements across career stages. Senior teachers, with accumulated experiential authority and established professional identities, may evaluate facilitator legitimacy primarily through integrity and professional alignment, while younger teachers may be more responsive to demonstrations of technical ability or instructional support. The framework therefore enables a nuanced analysis of how legitimacy is differentially constructed and contested within heterogeneous professional communities.

Although the empirical study is situated in the Chinese context, its contribution is explicitly international. Teacher professional development programmes are widespread globally, and recent research has demonstrated that the credibility and trustworthiness of PD facilitators constitute one of the most influential factors shaping PD effectiveness (Harper-Hill et al., 2022). By theorising facilitator legitimacy through an internationally recognised trust framework, this study speaks directly to European and international debates on external expertise, professional learning leadership, and relational governance in education. It offers transferable insights into how facilitator–teacher relationships can be designed and supported to enhance meaningful professional learning across diverse policy and cultural contexts.

This study was situated within the context of China’s ninth round of national curriculum reform, launched in 2014, which sought to strengthen teachers’ curriculum design, pedagogical reasoning, and classroom enactment through the National English Curriculum Standards. Against this policy backdrop, a professional learning initiative was implemented to support teachers’ interpretation and enactment of these standards within school-based practice. The professional learning activities were facilitated by a district-level teaching research officer (TRO), who also served as the researcher. As an external expert with extensive experience in curriculum development and teacher training, the facilitator introduced policy-level knowledge and subject expertise into the school. However, because he was not the TRO routinely responsible for the school’s ongoing professional learning, his engagement required relational negotiation beyond formal institutional authority. While the curriculum reform agenda and his policy-endorsed role provided initial legitimacy, teachers still needed to interpret and evaluate the relevance and credibility of this externally introduced expertise within their established professional practices. Participants included the PD facilitator as the focal trustee and thirteen English teachers as trustors. The facilitator had nearly two decades of teaching experience and had previously worked at the municipal education authority before joining the district teacher development centre, positioning him as both a seasoned practitioner and a policy-informed expert, yet an external figure to the school. The teacher participants comprised the school’s entire English faculty and represented different career stages. Data were collected over a nine-month professional learning initiative organised around iterative cycles of analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation. This study focused on interactional phases where trust-building processes were most visible. Data sources included twelve audio-recorded professional learning meetings, classroom observation notes, two rounds of semi-structured interviews with all teachers, written reflections from the facilitator, and supplementary artefacts such as unit designs and evaluative reports. All recordings were transcribed verbatim. Although the initiative drew on principles of Educational Design Research, the facilitator acted solely as a practitioner and was not involved in data analysis. Data analysis followed reflexive thematic analysis, combining inductive coding with theory-guided categorisation informed by the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Initial open coding captured facilitator enactments and teacher responses, which were subsequently organised around the dimensions of ability, benevolence, and integrity. Teachers’ interpretations were compared across career stages using a cross-case matrix. To enhance reliability, a subset of the data was independently coded by a second researcher, with discrepancies resolved through discussion.

This study is expected to demonstrate that professional legitimacy in teacher professional development is not a static attribute of the PD facilitator. Still, rather a relational accomplishment co-constructed through interaction and interpreted differently by teachers across various career stages. Legitimacy emerged through the interplay of benevolence, ability, and integrity, each functioning in distinct yet complementary ways to shape teachers’ trust judgments and engagement. Benevolence operated as the relational foundation of legitimacy. Through empathic alignment, the facilitator acknowledged teachers’ pressures and emotional realities, reducing perceived hierarchy and creating a psychologically safe space for participation. Respectful recognition further reinforced legitimacy by validating teachers’ existing expertise and positioning them as professional partners rather than passive recipients of reform. These enactments fostered openness and reflective engagement, particularly among younger teachers, while senior teachers acknowledged the supportive stance but often maintained professional distance, signalling a more conditional form of trust. Communal solidarity, enacted through shared identity and collective framing, strengthened group cohesion and participation, though its emotional impact was again moderated by teachers’ career stage and established professional identities. Ability functioned as a distributed mechanism of influence rather than a singular display of expertise. Claimed expertise, grounded in policy experience and professional credentials, initially reassured younger teachers but carried limited persuasive power for senior teachers. Presented expertise, visible in diagnostic feedback and pedagogical reasoning, enabled deeper professional dialogue and selective uptake across both groups. Proven expertise, demonstrated through classroom-relevant outcomes, constituted the most robust basis for sustained legitimacy, while also becoming a site of negotiation where senior teachers evaluated feasibility against contextual constraints. Integrity served as a form of backup assurance, reinforcing legitimacy when benevolence or ability alone was insufficient. Alignment with policy discourse, convergence with recognised experts, and appeals to collective aspiration provided value-based justification for the facilitator’s guidance.

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